Goodness is truth, truth goodness. It is a very Victorian notion, and it runs deep. But it also runs into trouble very quickly. Looking at the Victorians from the perspective of this idea turns out to have been my life's work, although I wasn't always aware of it. And it did so, I now realize, because the idea resonates into our own moment and reverberates quite personally for many of us. The essays gathered here spin with what I now recognize as relentless tenacity around the problems related to this fundamental idea. Approaching it first with my eye primarily on the art of the Victorians, it has taken me into the dry depths of epistemology, into the study of Darwin and considerations of evolutionary biology, into that inescapable turmoil over religion that marked so much of Victorian discourse and that muddies our own intellectual waters at the start of the twenty-first century, and back again into the very heart of the Victorian ideal of art – the “realism” of its fiction, the ethical tensions of its romantic poetry, and the various and brilliant rhetorics of its prose.

I bring together in this book many of the essays with which I have explored these problems, in various forms. They were written separately, for diverse occasions at different times, and it is only recently that I realized that they might be taken for chapters of a single book.